Bad news / good news/ bad news. Yesterday my co-workers and I were informed that the company we work for is closing shop. So I’m out of work. That’s the bad news. Myself and 3 of my co-workers are being given the opportunity to take over the business and make it our own. That’s the good news. I’m going to be so busy with this new business venture that I highly doubt I’ll be playing much EVE for the foreseeable future, nor can I afford it now. That’s the other bad news.

This is a great opportunity for me and I’m very excited about it but I’ll miss EVE, I was just getting warmed-up. This blog which has been so much fun, and been welcomed so kindly by the EVE community will most likely not be updated often if at all until I’m able to really play again.

I just wanted to thank all the great people in the social networking EVE community for welcoming me with open arms. I really hope to be back sooner rather than later. Until then…Fly Safe and may the ISK flow like water.

Bookmarks to port, bookmarks to stern, bookmarks to aft. This weekend in New Eden boiled down to 15 hours of boredom and 20 minutes of terror (well sorta). I set out Friday to do some honest to badness lowsec pirating. I didn’t find anyone to fight until sunday evening. In the meantime I made bookmarks.

Lots and lots of bookmarks, so many in fact that I now have a system with naming conventions for my bookmarks. Here’s what I’ve set up in about 12 lowsec systems:

Gate bookmarks:

OVERWATCH gate (system on other side of the gate name). e.g. OVERWATCH gate mara.
UNDERWATCH gate (system on other side of the gate name). e.g. UNDERWATCH gate mara.

Overwatch bookmarks are approx. 150km from a jump gate on star side of the gate. Underwatch bookmarks are approx. 150km from a jump gate on the far side of the gate from the system’s star. These allow me to scout out gates, relatively safely and let me jump directly to the gate if I want. Having two positions at a gate lets me be a little tricky. I can warp from one to another and it appears that I’m warping to the gate. Underwatch in most cases gives me a good view of where the ships are warping to within the system. This is helpful for finding potential prey. In the future I’ll add bookmarks within tackling and scrambling range but I’m not ready for that yet.

Asteroids/Ice fields

HUNT asteroid belt II (system planet) 1. e.g. HUNT asteroid belt II 1

These bookmarks are also 150 km from the belt. From here I can see if there is any potential targets at the belt and or NPCs. If I want to engage I can simply warp straight to the belt. I am considering manually adding some bookmarks at the belt, the two ends and the middle so that I am able to warp within an appropriate range to my target. This I learned the hard way which I’ll get to later.

Safes

Typically these retain their default names except for deep safes which get named “deep safe”, crazy I know.

I’ll usually make 3 or 4 “shallow” safes and 1 or 2 “deep” safes.

That’s it so far for my booking methodology. And no I don’t do this in every system, but it’s a good way to spend your time while hunting.

So after two days of stellar cartography I finally found a target. A lone Kestrel in system with only a couple of other people around. Kestrel vs Rifter seemed fair enough and I’d been itching for a fight all weekend. So let the hunt begin! I tracked that ship for 2o minutes, he must have been making rounds thru the system or he was hunting me. Everytime I thought I had him nailed down to a belt or station, he was gone right before I could warp there. Finally I scanned him within 5 degrees of an asteroid belt and warped straight to zero. I came out of warp CTRL-DoubleClicked and hit the afterburner. Then everything went down hill. I hoped to warp to him within 10k meters so I could tackle him but unfortunately I was about 1800km from him and I started taking missile hits at about 1700km out. Time to bail on plan A. I switch my approach to orbit spiral in on him to lessen the missile damage. Shields down to 50%. 1300m from target I switch back to direct approach but I’m not gaining any ground. I’m warp disrupted. Can’t get close enough to do any significant damage with my autocannons. Can’t tackle him. Can’t warp away. Into armor now. Repping the repairer just to see how long I can last but we both know it’s over. My ship blows a minute later and I warp away in my pod. GFs were exchanged. If only I’d warped in close enough to tackle him.

In the end I was happy to be in a fight where I had at least had a chance and now I’m thirsty for more.

Only 44 more fights till I graduate from my 50 fight plan, I need to pick up the pace.

It’s time to get serious about Sterling’s life as a corsair so she packed up last night and made the long flight to meet up with Siberian in Lonetrek.

I picked a series of lowsec systems and proceeded to go bookmark crazy. If Sterling was in a pirate movie my night would have been a montage of charts, rulers, compass, sextant, brandy drinking, and hearty laughter. I’ve got bookmarks on gates, out of gun range off gates, just off warp distance to gates and asteroid belts. Deep hiding spots, shallow hiding spots, and spots off stations and planets. The only thing I still need are instawarps from stations.

The last system I was staking out is a lowsec choke point between two groups of highsec systems. There is usually a lot of action in this system and Siberian has been killed there a few times. During my bookmarking rounds a gate camp formed around the gate leading back to my highsec home system. No problem I thought, they’ll be gone by the time I’m done. Well they weren’t. No problem I thought I’ll do some cautious ratting and they’ll be gone when I’m done. Well they weren’t. No problem I thought, it’s getting late I’ll just log off. Well I did, for about half an hour until I realized that my skill cue was about going to expire. No problem I thought, I’ll just log back in and add my next skill in my plan to the cue. Well the next two skills in my plan were sitting in skill book form in my home system, the system I couldn’t get to. Only 15 minutes left in the cue, the gatecamp is still there. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

I wish I could tell you how I warped to the gate, fought the battle of my life taking on 7 ships at once, hearing the rain of debris on my hull, grinning with big sharp teeth behind barrages of autocannon rounds, orbiting in perfectly efficient geometric paths as my armor shrugs off the hardest of hits. And victorious, my mad laughter echoed thru local as I jumped to highsec.

Well I can’t tell you that, instead I just added a couple of other skills to my cue and went to bed.

Let me lay the groundwork first and just say that I’m really only venting here. I’ve been playing EVE for about 4 months now. It took me 3 free trials before I “got” why EVE is fun at all, but once I did, well you don’t start a blog about something if you don’t feel pretty strongly about it.

I also own an xbox 360 and a PS3, I don’t game with the PS3 it’s really just a bluray player for me. I do play a lot of games on my 360. My coworkers and I started a gaming group about two years ago, every month for the last two years on a friday night about 10 of us will pick a few games to play online together. It’s a total blast. Since I’ve been playing EVE I’ve casually suggested to some of my friends that they try it. None of them are really that into MMOs but I thought I’d give it a go anyway. No one is interested which is totally fine. But keep the EVE hate away from me.

Some of the comments on our gaming group email list include such jems as “Doesn’t EVE play itself?”, “EVE is for nerds”, and “I’m pretty sure you can play EVE and something on your xbox at the same time”. The “EVE is for nerds” comment was accompanied by a manufacturing and refining spreadsheet someone had made. OK fine, some friendly ribbing I can take it. I guess.

As I said it took me 3 tries to get into EVE so I understand how people could dismiss it. It’s just that now that I’m heavily ensconced in EVE, and I understand how complex and open it is it really bugs me that my friends don’t get it. But everyone has their own tastes in games and I’ve always been attracted to the more complex ones (can you say Advanced Squad Leader?) so I’ll have to forgive them but I really wish they would get their head in the game and HTFU.

I’m a generalist by nature, in RL I’m a generalist in my field where most people are specialists. I just like variety and different kinds of challenges. Unfortunately this is not rewarded in EVE so it’s time to focus (or at least try).

The biggest issue which I realized last night is that I’m simultaneously training both Siberian and Sterling to be Rifter Pilots. The whole point of having two accounts was to train one for PvP, and have the other to satisfy my generalist desires (Research, Exploration, Trading). I just got so swept up in my love of the Rifter that I didn’t want to wait for Sterling to train up enough to fly it effectively so Siberian Jumped in. Well That ends here.

I’ve put together a skill plan for each character which will keep both of them busy for at least two months. It would be way easier to stick to a plan if you could add as many skills to your in-game cue as you wanted. Then you could load them up and forget about it till skill christmas comes around. I understand why you can’t do this but I’m just saying I’m weak and end up switching up my plan when I get it in my head that all of a sudden I want to be an expert scanner, oh and then the ultimate trader, er well maybe a highly trained covert-ops pilot. Anyway you get the idea. It’s time to FOCUS.

As for playing two characters simultaneously, it’s not for me. Neither do I have the technological ability to play both at the same time in a manner to my liking, from an immersion point of view I just don’t like splitting myself between two characters. So when the 6 months of my Power of Two is up I’ll just transfer Sterling over to my Siberian account and play whomever I’m in the mood for, it’ll be rough giving up the dual training but I can’t afford to have two accounts if I’m not going to play them both.

As for now, Siberian will be funding Sterling while she learns to PvP. I’ve managed to get my financial situation under control and if Siberian can keep it up, Sterling will have as many fit Rifters that she wants.

Oh yeah! And my wife is out of town for a week so I expect to be spending quite a bit of time in New Eden.

In response to my Going Minmatar post Pastor Phelps made an excellent comment that I’d like to reply to. I was hoping that posting my fit in that post might spurn some conversation. I was curious what people would think of it being the first time I posted a fit of my own making. I’ve been spending more and more time playing around with fits in EveHQ, it’s rather addictive.

So in defense of my Ruffian mark I fit let me clarify a couple of things and let you know what was on my mind when I put it together.

Still a N00b 🙂

I was really thinking more PvE than PvP, the addition of the web was really for practice with webbing tactics.

Designed with flying solo in mind.

The dual tank issue:

Siberian San is Caldari and has been shield tanking his whole life so skill wise I’m better off with a shield tank than an armor tank.

I prefer an active tank to passive in general.

In the tougher fights I was in with this fit, once my shields were down the armor plates gave me enough time to warp away, without them I’d have died a couple of times.

There wasn’t anything really helpful for me to put in the lower slots other than the plating.

Most of the fits I’ve seen online have 3 autocannons and a rocket launcher. Since I’m way more skilled with missiles than autocannons I dropped one for a launcher, and I chose standard instead of rockets simply so I could do damage at long range if I need to. This actually saved my life a few times. It’s really nice to be able to hit both at 500m and at 20km.

The defense rests. Except to say after looking over the two fits you posted and taking another look at RifterDrifter’s awesome rifter fitting guide I’m convinced to rethink my fit, especially if I intend to be PvPing. Even for my solo PvE fit I’m going to try out an active armor tank and see how that fairs for me. I’ll be reporting on my next fit and how it works out for me.